When Conor Sprouls, a customer service representative in the call center of insurance giant MetLife talks to a customer over the phone, he keeps one eye on the bottom-right corner of his screen. There, in a little blue box, A.I. tells him how he’s doing.

康納·史普爾斯是保險業巨擘大都會人壽電話客服中心的客戶服務代表，當他透過電話跟客戶談話時，一隻眼緊盯電腦屏幕右下角一個藍色方塊，人工智慧會告知他表現如何。

Talking too fast? The program flashes an icon of a speedometer, indicating that he should slow down.

講話太快？程式會跳出一個速度表的圖示，告訴他該放慢速度。

Sound sleepy? The software displays an “energy cue,” with a picture of a coffee cup. Not empathetic enough? A heart icon pops up.

聲音顯得睏倦？軟體會以一個咖啡杯的圖案作為“能量提示”。不夠有同理心？愛心圖案就會跳出。

For decades, people have fearfully imagined armies of hyper-efficient robots invading offices and factories, gobbling up jobs once done by humans. But in all of the worry about the potential of artificial intelligence to replace rank-and-file workers, we may have overlooked the possibility it will replace the bosses, too.

數十年來，人們一直害怕地想像著高效率機器人入侵辦公室與工廠，把原屬人類的工作大舉搶去，然而在有關人工智慧可能取代基層人員的種種憂慮中，我們可能忽略了它也會取代上司的可能性。

Sprouls and the other call center workers at his office in Warwick, Rhode Island, still have plenty of human supervisors. But the software on their screens — made by Cogito, an A.I. company in Boston — has become a kind of adjunct manager, always watching them. At the end of every call, Sprouls’ Cogito notifications are tallied and added to a statistics dashboard that his supervisor can view. If he hides the Cogito window by minimizing it, the program notifies his supervisor.

史普爾斯跟羅德島沃維克市客服中心辦公室內其他同事的工作，目前仍有不少上級主管在監督，但他們螢幕上由波士頓人工智慧公司Cogito製作的軟體，已成為兼職管理人員，不斷監督著他們。每次通話結束時，史普爾斯的Cogito通知就會被統計，並加到他主管可查看的統計板中。若他透過最小化方式將Cogito視窗隱藏，該程式會通知他的主管。

Cogito is one of several A.I. programs used in call centers and other workplaces. The goal, according to Joshua Feast, Cogito’s chief executive, is to make workers more effective by giving them real-time feedback.

Cogito是數個用於客服中心及其他工作場所的人工智慧程式之一。Cogito執行長約書亞．菲斯特指出，目的是透過即時反饋來提高員工的效率。

“There is variability in human performance,” Feast said. “We can infer from the way people are speaking with each other whether things are going well or not.”

菲斯特說：「人的表現是具有變化性的。我們可從人們相互交談的方式來推斷事情是否進展順利。」

The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace, A.I. sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized. Amazon uses complex algorithms to track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers, and can automatically generate the paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets, as The Verge uncovered this year.

效率一直是自動化的目標，但在這種新型工作場所中，人工智慧把人性本身看作是需要優化的事物。一如The Verge今年所揭露的，亞馬遜使用複雜演算法追蹤履行中心員工的生產力，且可自動製成文件用以開除未達目標的員工。

(Amazon has disputed that it fires workers without human input, saying that managers can intervene in the process.) IBM has used Watson, its A.I. platform, during employee reviews to predict future performance and claims it has a 96% accuracy rate.

（亞馬遜一直辯稱不會在沒有真人介入的情況下開除員工，表示管理人員可在過程中進行干預。）IBM曾在員工評估期間使用旗下人工智慧平台Watson預測未來績效，並聲稱有96%準確率。

Then there are the startups. Cogito, which works with large insurance companies like MetLife and Humana as well as financial and retail firms, says it has 20,000 users. Percolata, a Silicon Valley company that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients, uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker, and rank workers from most to least productive.

其次是新創公司。跟大都會人壽、Humana等大型保險公司及金融和零售業者合作的Cogito表示，該公司有2萬個用戶。客戶包括優衣庫和7-Eleven的矽谷公司Percolata，使用店內感應器來計算每個員工的「真實生產力」分數，並將員工依生產力從最高到最低加以排列。

Source article: https://paper.udn.com/udnpaper/POH0067/344431/web/